Keeping the Barbarians In

While on my way to Rome, I stopped off in Oxford for several weeks at my mother-in-law's. If you set out to imagine a don's house, it would look a lot like hers. Three stories packed with books, from the orderly shelves of the study where she keeps those closest to her heart and work to the half-sorted heaps and two-deep shelves of the landings where several lifetimes of reading are stored: hers, her ex-husband's, her children's. As I went up and down the stairs I'd often stop for a browse, wondering whether to take the Life of Johnson down to breakfast or an undiscovered author up to bed (Rose Macaulay, Barbara Pym, a whole canon of British fiction from every phase of postwar life). It was in this way, on an earlier visit, that I first began to love Iris Murdoch. This time I was caught by a name more familiar to Americans: Edmund Wilson. His Europe without Baedeker was propped next to some other old Hogarth Press editions, a fine Henry Green with curious art deco cover, some Virginia Woolf. Wilson, Edmund is a strange name to find in a house more accustomed to Wilson, Angus and Wilson, A.N., but there he was.

The book is a collected series of essays that Wilson wrote for the New Yorker during the months just before and after V-E day in the spring and summer of 1945. He visited London, Rome, Paris, Greece and points in between, much in the manner of the classical "Grand Tour" of Americans and Englishmen of the 19^th century; hence the allusion to the bible of English-speaking travelers in the title. But as the back of the book announces, "He had no need of his Baedeker for the Second World War had just ended and ancient ruins were replaced with a whole heap of new ones." Wilson knew Europe before the war, but his accounts are almost entirely free of nostalgia or even acknowledgment of the past. He wasn't there to write a guidebook, and the guidebook genre makes a clumsy frame for what became a furious polemic against the English at the moment when only a few red rays of Empire remained. Every chapter details the petty hypocrisy of the British officials, the hash they make of everything they occupy, their casual racism, and also the destructive realpolitik of the little wars in Greece and Yugoslavia that followed the great war.

Better than a guide, though, Wilson had introductions. He seems to have done pretty much as he pleased: his Europe is populated by the officials he meets, Roman aristocrats, Russian emigrés, and, oh yes, plenty of prostitutes. It's hard to imagine that today's New Yorker would publish the journals of, say, a fifty-year-old sex tourist in Amsterdam, Moscow, and Thailand, but Wilson describes such encounters as naturally as he might a play attended or a new writer discovered. He picks up prostitutes whenever he feels "at a bit of a loose end," whether in London, Paris, Rome, or Naples. At least his behavior certainly seems better than that of the GIs he sees "taking" women against the walls of the Via Veneto. With the manners of an old-fashioned gentleman, he pays his dolls extra to stay and talk, or takes them out for a nice dinner in a black market restaurant. He interviews one French prostitute he picks up in London who tells him (of course) that the English are bad lovers and the Americans among the best: "They were rather bruyants, but then they were ‘loin de chez eux' and no doubt behaved better at home; and, in any case, they were gay to go out with and really liked to have a good time." Who wouldn't be seduced now, reading this vision of our greatest generation in action!

Above all, Wilson writes as an American in Europe at the dawning of the age of American world domination. He declares the new world order in which the formerly provincial powers of Russia and the US move to the center: "The little European nations, among which England now must be counted, have fallen into the provincial role in relation to the larger societies of the Soviet Union and the United States." He recognizes that the Second World War brought an end to European nationalism and praises the superior organization of Russian and American life that seems to push them toward his imagined social democratic utopia. As much as he recognized the defects of Stalinism, Wilson remained both a russophile and even a bit of what we'd now call a patriot.

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